The citizens of Kyrgyzstan, a nominally Muslim country, have an interesting history with Islam: While the nomadic Kyrgyz haven’t really been introduced to the religion before the 18th century, Kyrgyzstani Uzbeks from the Ferghana Valley practice a more traditional form of Islam. During the Soviet era, religion was pushed to the sidelines of society, but Islam has seen some revival since Kyrgyzstan’s independence in 1991, again mostly in the southern rural parts of the country.

Hajj pilgrims heading to Mecca from Osh, southern Kyrgyzstan. By Flickr user teokaye.

Last week, Kyrgyzstani bloggers were worried about the threat of Islamisation in their country. The debate was the result of an interdepartmental commission’s decision to allow Muslim women to wear hijabs for their passport photographs. (more…)

How serious is the Islamist threat in Central Asia? What is the future of Russian influence in the region? Is a regime change in Uzbekistan imminent? Whither Kyrgyzstan? Dr. Eric McGlinchey recently sat down with neweurasia to offer his expertise on all these questions and more.

McGlinchey is an Assistant Professor of Politics and Government at George Mason University, a member of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) Program on New Approaches to Russian Security, and is an advisor to the Eurasia Program at the National Bureau of Asian Research (NBR). He is among the first of a new generation of scholars offering policymakers a fresh perspective on Central Asian affairs. (neweurasia has covered several of his presentations.) His research focuses on Islam and social mobilization, information communication technology, and authoritarianism in Central Asia.
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Martha Brill Olcott of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace was once again kind enough to be interviewed by neweurasia. Previously, we asked her about Carnegie’s new website Central Asian Voices. This time, Dr. Olcott answered questions on everything from Islamic extremism to democratization to the Tulip Revolution.

Update: Thanks to Carnegie, this interview is now available on their site in Russian (Благодаря Carnegie интервью теперь доступно на их сайте на русском языке).

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Carleton College Professor Adeeb Khalid presented a his research on November 15th titled “Understanding Soviet Islam: Religion, Nationality and Citizenship in Soviet Central Asia” at George Mason University. His lecture was based on extensive research for a book coming out in January that will be the only narrative history of Islam in Central Asia during the entire Soviet period.

Khalid’s principle argument was that the Soviet Union had a profound impact on Central Asian Islam and made the region unique in the Muslim world. This point may seem intuitive, but was presented as a counterargument to an outdated understanding of Soviet Islam that argues: (1) the Soviets were fundamentally unsuccessful in their project of transforming Muslim consciousness; (2) Islam remained a force of opposition to Soviet ideology; (3) Soviet Central Asians were either Sovietized atheists or traditional Muslims outside the system.

Khalid began the lecture by dispelling several common myths about Soviet Islam. First, he said that Islam used as a label so totalizing as to be almost useless as a term; there are infinite possibilities of interpretation and practice. Radically opposed ideologies can be equally rooted in legitimate Islamic sources. He noted that this is also true of any other religion, and in fact, because Islam has no formal church or clergy, diversified opinions and practices are even more common.

Secondly, it is commonly believed that Soviet Central Asia was completely isolated from the outside world. According to Khalid, this is fundamentally untrue. Many Muslims from neighboring countries studied in Central Asian cities such as Tashkent, though it should be noted that they were carefully selected by the Soviets and were predominantly studying science and engineering.

He began the main part of his lecture by positing that the Soviet experiment was actually far more successful than many give it credit for. His narrative was divided into three main periods.
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Here is a report with a number of reactions and eulogies about the man who was buried today.

Said Abdullo Nuri was the founder and leader (nicknamed ‘ustod’ or teacher) of the only surviving and/or active section of the
Islamic Rennaissance Party or IRP. The IRP was founded in Astrakhan in 1990 for the rights of Soviet Muslims and was initially an all-union party that fell apart in republican sections (mainly in Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Dagestan) when the Soviet Union collapsed.

Although his roots were in Sangvor in the Western Pamirs, Nuri’s family was resettled in the cotton districts in the Vakhsh valley, where he grew up. It was there that the Tajik IRP had a large chunk of its following.

Nuri was prominent in the decade that followed independence, when he initially emerged to lead the United Tajik Opposition (UTO) — a coalition of groups opposed to rule by post-Soviet apparatchiks. He fled the country during the civil war but continued to run the UTO from his exile

When I lived in Dushanbe, I rented a house about fifty metres from Nuri’s mansion close to the former cinema studio. Obituaries are what they are, of course, yet from my side, there was one thing he said, at a certain moment, that I have kept in mind all these years:

I am opposed to an Islamic state because when the state does wrong, Islam will get the blame.

The discourse on Islam in former Soviet republics with predominantly Muslim populations was long dominated by a perception of a ‘regional extremist threat’ often dubbed ‘Wahhabism’. One can not deny that there is a radical, violent fringe that wreaked havoc in the region. Some, spin-offs of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan or militant groups from Chechnya, for instance, could do so again.

The question is, however, if that fringe has a strong military-political capacity and a real base and ideological impact among the region’s population. As important: what does and could Islam, both as a religion and a social-normative system, actually mean for the region and its at least nominally Muslim population?

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Neweurasia has launched a new series of topic-specific posts across all of the country blogs in an effort to provide readers a comprehensive overview of current issues in Eurasia. The first focused on HIV/AIDS in the region, and the topic now at hand is the role of religion in politics across the region. You can find a country-specific discussion of this topic at each of the following country blogs:

• Azerbaijan by Marianna
• Kazakhstan by Ben
• Kyrgyzstan by Claire and by Yulia
• Tajikistan by James
• Turkmenistan by Peter
• Uzbekistan by Nick

Also, be sure to check out the broader context provided by Christopher DeVito, who describes the rise of Islam as a political force in the Middle East, and its significance to in Central Asia.

Introduction

The influence religion has come to have on politics has become an extremely charged topic in recent years, and Eurasia is no exception. With the majority of the population of most countries Muslim (key exceptions being Mongolia, Armenia, and Georgia; we do not have posts for any of those countries), this choice in topic inevitably narrows to political Islam, an even more controversial subtopic.

In other parts of the world, there is no ambiguity about the role of Islam in politics. Saudi Arabia does not even pretend to have a constitution, stating that the Qur’an is all that is necessary to govern a country. Although Saudi Arabia is an absolutist state, in countries with some degree of democratic rule it has come be hugely influential as a grassroots movement; Hamas, an Islamist party won a popular election in Palestine, and it is very likely that the Muslim Brotherhood would win such an election in Egypt.

Where does Eurasia fit into all this? What role does Islam play in politics, what role is it likely to play in the future, and what role should it play? The answer is far from clear, and academics, journalists, and bloggers on sites like neweurasia and Registan disagree vehemently.

This survey will attempt to make some qualified, generalized responses to exactly those questions based on the country posts, but first it is important to place the rise of the current religions in Eurasia in a historical context.

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by Christopher DeVito

The following is an overview of political Islam in the Middle East and its relevance to Central Asia as a context for neweurasia’s survey of relgion in politics.

Any comprehensive attempt to address the broad currents of political Islam in the Arab world and the influence that such movements have had on their counterparts in Central Asia would require much lengthier consideration than offered below. For our purposes I have looked briefly at a number of important subjects. They include some of the intellectual origins of modern political Islam, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Saudi Arabia.

Modern Political Islam: Origins
Many Scholars of Political Islam credit the Iranian born Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani (1839-1897) with the fathering of contemporary Islamic political activism. Often remembered as an Islamic modernist, the influence of Al-Afghani’s thought is still apparent in the philosophies of most contemporary Islamists. Cosmopolitan and widely traveled, al-Afghani did much of his most influential writing from London and Paris. While he was deeply opposed to British imperialism, he was also enamored with the scientific and technologically advanced societies of Western Europe. He, however, maintained the belief that the scientific advancement of European societies had been built on a foundation of Islamic science and philosophy.

In an attempt to reclaim what he saw as the Islamic world’s rightful position as a leader in these fields he sought to counter what he understood to be the “backwardness” of Islamic culture through the rationalization of religion. Like many modern day Islamic fundamentalist he saw the superstition and practice of the dominant folk religion, principally tasawuf or Sufiism, as a hindrance to the scientific and political ascendancy of the Muslim world. To this end he sought a return to the “true” Islam of the past, a movement knownas salafism. (I do not address al-Qaeda, or its affiliated organizations relationship to this intellectual movement as it is another topic in and of itself)

This attempt at a purification of Islam garnered influential followers such as the Egyptian jurist Muhammad Abduh, and (skipping ahead) would have profound influence on the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood Hassan al-Banna, and other luminaries of modern Islamic fundamentalism such as Muhammad Iqbal, Sayyid Qutb and Abu A’la al-Mawdudi.

The development of this new intellectual worldview, sometimes called neo-Salafism, was an urban phenomenon that attempted to reconcile the practice of Islam with modernity and a program of political renewal. To this end the neo-Salfis attacked the traditional social networks of most Sufi orders accusing them of being a source of the backwardness of Islamic societies in general. A notable exception to this trend was the Sharia, rather than mystically, oriented Sufi Brotherhood, or tariqa, of the Naqshabandis, prevalent in Central Asia, which to this day continues to harbor many reform minded fundamentalists.

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The growth of Islamic finance over the past decades has led some analysts to ponder its significance for Central Asia. Islamic finance is consistent with principles of Islamic law and therefore prohibits usury, which also entails the collection and payment of interest (riba).

So, some banks in the Muslim world came up with a set of instruments that would still allow for commercial banking to take place. The most common is hibah, which means as much as ‘gift’: Banks pay depositors a voluntary amount of money as an interest on savings account balances.

Central Asia’s most thriving banking sector is undoubtedly the Kazakh one. Dinar Standard thus wonders whether there is also potential for Islamic banking to gain a foothold.

Given the tremendous progress in the banking sector one would expect some movement in Islamic finance – especially since majority of the people in the Central Asian nations are Muslim. The fact of the matter, however, is that the progress of Islamic Finance in Central Asia has so far been negligible.

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While reports suggest that there has been some interest from the Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and Uzbek governments, the private sector seems to be completely aloof to the prospects.

Obviously, one of the reasons for this is the lack of awareness, says Mr. Rushdi Siddiqui of Dow Jones Islamic Market Index:

[S]ome “Muslim countries … do not even seem to know that Islamic Banking exists.�

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Eurasianet has a discussion recap on the so-called ‘Islamist threat in Uzbekistan (IMU and Hizb-ut-Tahrir in particular). Some of the points have already popped up on this blog, yet…

Authoritarian-minded leaders have continued to portray the radical groups as a major security threat to justify political clampdowns, Khamidov said. By “painting them [radical groups] as a threat,” Central Asian leaders, especially Uzbekistan’s Islam Karimov, have been able to “target political opponent and postpone much needed reform.” Khamidov estimated that about 11 percent of the Uzbek population holds radical Islamic views, but added that only about half of those radicals favor the establishment of an Islamic state in Uzbekistan.

An interesting point, in my opinion, is this…

In recent months, regional residents frustrated by declining living standards have tended to shun radical groups in favor of so-called jamiyats – described by Abramson as “Islamic self-help organizations.” In English jamiyat is translated as meaning either “society” or “association.” In the Central Asian context, jamiyats have formed in order to plug wide gaps in government safety nets in some Central Asian states, especially Uzbekistan. Abramson explained that jamiyats provide “social welfare - extending employment to families.” According to Khamidov, these groups are not militant and “don’t want the establishment of an Islamic state. What they want is a greater role for Islamic values in society.”

Increasingly, officials have come to view the economic work of jamiyats as a threat to their political positions. Karimov in particular has attempted to portray jamiyats as extremist in orientation, intending to disband the organizations and tighten his grip on power.